| My feelings so far towards Civ II Multiplayer Gold Edition (MGE) have been up and down. When I first bought the game, I was very excited about it. When I heard on December 3rd that the game had been released, I rushed down to my local Best Buy store to buy it—before it had even made it on to the shelves. My first weekend of playing, however, started to sour me a little bit on the game. Games were really slow—I was playing with some people through The Zone who didn’t seem to realize that you didn’t NEED to take your entire 5 minutes to move all your pieces when you only had, say, 2 pieces! (Also, the 5 minute time limit was way too high for the early turns of the game.) On some, but not all, of the games I played, there was considerable lag time (1-2 seconds) each time you moved a piece one square. This was very frustrating. |
Also frustrating were the new bugs that appeared—the Goto movement bug was especially bad. It forced me to move all my pieces manually—this didn’t help the length of the game. The technology trading window for human-to-human negotiations didn’t work very well, either, in my opinion. I posted a thread in the Multiplaying Forum about these bugs, and thankfully William Denman from Microprose appeared on the scene and promised that these bugs would be soon fixed in a patch.
That news that Microprose did indeed appear to care, at least on a basic level, about its customers heartened me and started improving my outlook on the game. And on the weekend of the 12th-13th I played a game that was actually kind of fun. In this game I was playing against Drefsab (from the Forums) and two others. I got killed by one of the others almost right away—I was trying to expand too quickly by building settlers, and hadn’t even built a warrior when the enemy horsemen swept in and destroyed me. DOH!—Bad strategy on my part. But I jumped back into the game, took over the French AI civ, and proceeded to build up my empire (pretty well IMHO considering my late start). We finished that night around 100 AD or so. We planned to meet again to continue the game, but my weekend became suddenly quite busy and I wasn’t able to rejoin the others at the appointed time.
In conclusion, I feel that the key to enjoying MGE will be to find people you will play regularly with. The Zone might be a good place to meet people, but in the end, I feel that games on the Zone will be unfulfilling unless you can find people who are willing to commit to a multi-session game. MGE games will almost always be too long to complete in one sitting, in my opinion. If you keep this in mind, I feel that MGE will be a very enjoyable game for anyone who loves Civ. If you are used to playing fast games, you may want to steer clear of MGE—it may not be for you.
